Man charged in search hoax has long history in legal system

The man accused of being at the centre of a hoax that launched a large-scale rescue mission in the woods off Beaver Bank Road on Monday has been in trouble with the law many times before.

Police have not identified the suspect, but The Chronicle Herald has learned he is Stephen Lloyd Branton, 38, a Beaver Bank man whom RCMP have charged with causing public mischief.

More than 100 search and rescue members, police officers, firefighters and paramedics converged on the scene of a reported ATV accident in Beaver Bank on Monday morning.

A man showed up a home at about 7:45 a.m. claiming he had been in a snowmobile crash and his friend was injured and still in the woods.

But by mid-afternoon, the man admitted he had made up the whole story, police have said. He was arrested and the search was called off.

Branton has been released from custody and is to appear in Dartmouth provincial court on March 19.

This isn’t the first time Branton has been accused of public mischief.

On Jan. 2, he was charged with committing mischief by making a false statement to police last Sept. 25 in Beaver Bank that another person had committed an offence.

Branton pleaded not guilty to the charge Jan. 8 in Dartmouth provincial court and has a trial set for November.

He’s also due in Dartmouth court Feb. 11 on three charges of theft under $5,000 and again on March 3 for sentencing on charges of impaired driving and unlawfully being at large.

According to court records, Branton has 16 other criminal convictions in Nova Scotia since 1994 for a variety of offences. His record includes three convictions for arson, three for refusing the breathalyzer and one each for sexual assault, assaulting a police officer, unauthorized possession of a firearm, breaching a firearms prohibition, cultivating marijuana, possession of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking, impaired driving, dangerous driving, unlawfully being in a dwelling and breaching probation.

In 1996, Branton was placed on probation and ordered to get help for alcoholism and antisocial personality disorder after he was convicted of setting fire to his parents’ home and starting a fire in a bedroom of his girlfriend’s home where their five-month-old baby was sleeping at the time.

In 2001, Branton was acquitted of setting a fire at the Unama’ki tribal police station in Membertou.